The discipline ledger.
Four cadence rituals govern this codebase. They run on a clock, enforced by CI. Their entries are append-only, never deleted, and published as written.
Most companies say they have a quality process. This page is the process — public, dated, every entry retrievable. Drift would show up here first.
Quality Council
every 3 days · activation: Quality Council
A 30-minute synthesis review pulling the ratchet movements, top user-reported issues, top internal regressions, and a forward-looking question that prevents drift into "we always measure these things."
### Top-line numbers (snapshot at B4356) - **Builds since the last council (2026-07-11, B4234):** 122 nominal (B4235 → B4356); 120 non-snapshot commits in the window. A dense window — four multi-build campaigns (meta-audit execution, SEO initiative, Linear council, DE-TELL war room) plus the standing as-cast walk. - **Tests:** AUTO-STATE reports **12,964 passing across 981 `.test.ts` files** (CLAUDE.md AUTO-STATE, verified 2026-07-16 @ B4309 / `ba281001`). No fresh full `vitest run` was taken this session — the caller flagged time and asked for the gate-green path, so per the quality-council skill I cite the AUTO-STATE f
Trust Decay Audit
every 14 days · activation: Trust Decay Audit
Walks every public claim (homepage, /scoring/standard, /the-receipts, reproducibility seal) against verified implementation facts. Catches drift between what the site says and what the code does before users do.
**Trigger:** Cadence due — last entry 2026-07-06 (B4131), 15 days elapsed; the 14-day target passed 2026-07-20 and `check:cadence-health` reddens at 22d (reads "16d since 2026-07-06, threshold 22d" this session). Per SA#18 the owed ritual ships before feature work. **Two riders this cycle** (War Room II §2.8 stage 1, `docs/MODEL-LAB-WAR-ROOM-2-2026-07-21.md`): (1) a lab-claims register for the model-lab program's nine `docs/generated/` verdict artifacts, and (2)
Bet Reviews
every 45 days · activation: Bet Review
Lists 5 builds shipped 45 days ago, marks each as moved-the-metric / didn't / killed. The retrospective discipline — pruning what didn't work is harder than shipping what does.
Third Bet Review, filed at B4309 by the cadence-runner agent (57 days since the 2026-05-20 entry; its self-scheduled 2026-07-04 review date is 12 days past; CI-red would arrive 2026-07-20). Per the protocol, the reviewed window is builds shipped ~45 days ago: **B3527-B3583 (2026-05-29 → 2026-06-04)** [SRC: `git log --since=2026-05-29 --until=2026-06-04`]. 2,030 commits landed since the last entry
External Audit Prep
every 45 days · activation: External Audit Prep
Generates the brief for the next external reviewer trio (engineer / songwriter / AI safety researcher). The forcing function that keeps internal claims honest under outside scrutiny.
This is the brief that gets sent to the first three external reviewers once the operator identifies + recruits them. The brief itself is a ritual artifact: it forces us to write down the questions before we hear answers we can't unhear. ### Reviewers - **Engineer:** TBD — target: senior IC at a music-tech company (Splice, Output, LANDR, Native Instruments, or similar). Compensation: $500 + 60-min review every 45 days.
How "overdue" gets enforced
Every push runs npm run check:cadence-health. If any cadence is past its threshold (Quality Council > 7 days, Trust Decay > 22 days, Bet Review + External Audit > 60 days) the gate fails and the deploy blocks. Drift can't accumulate silently — the next push won't go out until the overdue ritual runs and an entry lands here.
That's what makes the discipline real. A ritual unenforced is a ritual that decays. The 22 CI ratchets in the codebase work the same way — every metric only moves down.